Is Australia really resigned to this?

The attack on Jews at prayer in Manchester on Yom Kippur – the holiest day in the Jewish calendar – will echo far beyond Britain.

It is being felt in every Jewish home across the world, including here in Australia. Because every conversation since – every single one – carries the same fearful refrain: “It’s only a matter of time here.”

That sentence has become the quiet soundtrack of Jewish life in the Diaspora.
It is whispered in shule foyers, discussed around dinner tables, murmured among parents watching their children walk to Jewish schools with security guards on the gates.

Is Australia really resigned to this? Have we reached the point where violence against Jews has become the next expected headline – a grim inevitability we are too weary or too timid to resist? If so, what does that say about us as a nation? About our civic courage, our decency, our willingness to defend the very values on which modern Australia was built?

How could we, of all societies, have allowed ourselves to come to this place – a place where the oldest hatred in history once again prowls our campuses, our media, and our streets?

The failure of leadership

The answer lies in weak leadership – at every level of our society.

It lies in the failure to call out the anti-Australian values of those who have made antisemitism respectable again – who have wrapped hate in the language of human rights and convinced too many decent people that vilifying Jews is an act of virtue.

It lies with the university leaders who turn away as their academics teach that Israel is evil, colonial, genocidal – and that Jewish students are somehow its agents. It lies with the student activists who fill lecture halls and city squares chanting “From the river to the sea,” oblivious to – or, worse, wilfully deciding – that the slogan they are shouting is a call for the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state.

It lies with the artists and cultural institutions that cancel Jewish performers or refuse to show Jewish art unless its creator publicly condemns Israel. It lies with the unionists and union leaders who march behind Hamas flags while claiming to represent the Australian worker. It lies with the journalists, cartoonists and editors who tell themselves they are being brave truth-tellers while recycling propaganda, posting false images on page one and burying corrections deep inside the paper once the damage is done.

And it lies with the politicians – many of whom, frankly, duck for cover to avoid angering the loudest and most aggressive pro-Hamas bullies.

The poison of moral cowardice

Together, they have normalised a poison. They have made it intellectually fashionable to hate Jews – so long as you pretend it’s about Israel.

The new antisemitism doesn’t always shout “Jews out.” It hides behind hashtags and slogans, behind the clever double-speak of “anti-Zionism”, behind the moral posturing of those who think they are standing up for justice while standing shoulder to shoulder with bigotry.

But the effect is the same.
Jewish children walk to school in fear. Jewish businesses are vandalised. Jewish performers are boycotted. Jewish voices are silenced. And the wider society – the one that proudly proclaims its commitment to inclusion and tolerance – looks away.

Collective blame: an obscenity in disguise

No other minority in Australia is treated this way. Do we attack Australian Turks for Erdogan’s bombing of the Kurds? Do we blame Iranian Australians for the oppression of women in Tehran? Do we hound Sudanese Australians for the real genocide unfolding in Sudan? Of course not.

Only the Jews are made to answer for a foreign war. Only the Jews are deemed collectively guilty. Only the Jews are fair game. And when we ask for protection, for fairness, for equality before the law – we are told, absurdly, that we are the powerful ones. This is moral inversion of the highest order – and the silence that follows it is complicity.

Silence breeds violence

So as the demonstrations continue – as mobs scream for Israel’s destruction and wave the flags of those who raped and murdered Israeli women and children – remember this: It is happening because the haters and the antisemites have been allowed to get away with it.

Each act of silence has licensed the next act of violence. Each unchallenged lie has laid the ground for the next assault.

It is enough. Australia is better than this. Or at least, it was.

The question now is whether our leaders – political, academic, artistic, civic, business – have the courage to make it true again. The courage to reassert the Australian values of pluralism, tolerance and respect for all, no matter who you are. The courage to say that Jewish Australians are as deserving of safety, dignity and belonging as every other minority in this country. And the courage to call out those who would tear that social fabric apart.

Because what happened in Manchester is not just a British tragedy.
It is a warning – a glimpse of what happens when hatred is left to fester, when leadership fails, and when silence becomes the coward’s refuge.

If we do nothing, it will not remain a distant story. It will become our own.

Adam Slonim is the host of the Behind the Headlines podcast.